"The crisis facing a couple of middle-aged Belgian tech bros in the 1990s might be better suited to a European streaming-TV drama maybe with the two antiheroes' travails confined to the first episode, setting up a lengthier intergenerational drama taking us to the present. Nonetheless, here it is: a feature film in the Berlin competition from screenwriter Angelo Tijssens and director Anke Blonde, handsomely produced and shot, and impeccably acted."
"Arieh Worthalter and Jan Hammenecker play Geert and Luc, two balding guys who, in the late 90s, are Belgium's pinup boys of tech innovation. Their startup company has gone public and made them both very rich, and all their local friends, family and businesses have plunged every cent of their savings into shares. Geert and Luc are now poised to turn the mud of Flanders into a European Silicon Valley."
"But in the audience is investigative journalist Aaron (Anthony Welsh), who confronts them with the awful truth: for years they have been fabricating profits to boost their share price, secure lucrative government grants and, on some unconscious level, bolster their own ridiculous egos. His story will break on Monday, leaving them and their investors penniless, and with Geert and Luc facing a prison sentence."
The film follows two balding Belgian entrepreneurs, Geert and Luc, whose public startup made them rich while local friends, family and businesses invested all their savings. The pair stage a theatrical corporate presentation featuring clunky late-90s voice-to-text hardware. Investigative journalist Aaron exposes years of fabricated profits used to inflate share prices and secure government grants, leaving investors penniless and exposing the founders to prison. The production is handsomely shot and strongly acted but maintains a parochial focus, presenting a small, sad tale of the early dotcom bust that reads as an omen for an AI-obsessed present.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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